Leading off today: Wrestling coach Bob Bernarducci is on track to record career victory No. 500 to kick off the new year.
Bernarducci, Pleasantville's longtime coach and Section 1's all-time leader in wins, has 499 victories and can reach the round number Saturday at Ardsley's Radomski Duals.
"I'm a little in awe that I'm up to that number," Bernarducci, 73, told LoHud.com. "I remember when I hit 200 and was thinking, "OK, how much longer do you think you can go?"
Bernarducci started coaching at Irvington in 1982 and has been at Pleasantville since 1990.
Wrestling has seen numerous changes since Bernarducci started coaching, not the least of which has been the number of matches for competitors each season. But Bernarducci points to weight management and nutrition.
"When I first started coaching, kids concentrated more on losing weight and they'd be miserable," he said. "Now with weight certifications, wrestlers are told about proper nutrition and to drink more water. Kids aren't suffering much to wrestle. I have very few kids who are losing a tremendous amount of weight. Guys would starve themselves and I haven't had a kid anywhere near that in years."
Speaking of milestones
Greenwich senior guard Brooke Kuzmich scored 30 points Saturday in a 76-29 basketball victory to go over 2,000 for her career.
And a record that's just aching to be broken
Regrettably, I don't follow track and field nearly as closely as I used to in my younger days. There just aren't enough hours in a week to get to everything else I need to do, and coverage of the (perceived) lesser sports by the media has evaporated over decades of cost-cutting and staff reductions.
However, a pursuit taking place in Section 2 has caught my attention.
Colonie senior Ryan Buskey, who has already committed to the University of Georgia, already has cleared 7 feet in the high jump four times this season. That includes a mark of 7-2 last month at the JAMBAR Coaches Hall of Fame meet.
The Section 2 and state indoor records belong to Dan Olson of Albany Academy, who cleared 7-4 at a meet in March 2001. The fact that Buskey, who also cleared 7-2 as a junior, is in range to take down a record from a quarter of a century ago makes him worth watching as the season goes on.
Section 5 girls AAA basketball is beefed up
Jason Ritzel of the
Democrat and Chronicle did another strong reporting job this week as he explained the upcoming change to the NYSPHSAA's classification rules in the context of telling why Section 5 suddenly has a more robust Class AAA field in girls basketball.
The increased authority of the NYSPHSAA Oversight Committee is something I've previously covered in blogs, but it was good to see the Rochester paper explain it to the local audience.
In the process, however, he got me wondering about a bit of what I hope was unintended messaging from Section 5.
Some background:
When the NYSPHSAA expanded to six classes in some sports in the 2023-24 school year, it changed the distribution of teams in classifications across the state. Section 5 may have more schools than any of the other 10 sections, but it was left with slim pickings in the new Class AAA. The 2024 girls sectional soccer tournament consisted of three teams and two games.
Girls basketball hasn't been much better: six teams and five games. Contrast that with Class C, where there are 30 teams that will play down to a single representative in the state tournament this winter.
However, Section 5 girls basketball now has a more competitive Class AAA tournament. That's because the section's Classification Review Committee has moved Aquinas and Bishop Kearney, each with a history of success in the sport, up to the highest class.
Moving Aquinas up wasn't a tough decision given that the team was returning a lot of talent from the roster that reached the 2025 state Class AA final. Bishop Kearney would have been a tougher decision had the school not asked to move up; though the team finished 16-6 last season, Kearney was eliminated in the AA sectional quarterfinals.
But a quote in the story caught my attention.
"Part of the thinking was to legitimize AAA," Section 5 coordinator Tim Lincoln told the paper. "Now it's a legitimate classification. We're up to eight teams. It solidifies the classification. And with Aquinas winning AA last year, it only made sense to move them up."
Again, moving Aquinas up made sense. But any talk of "legitimizing" a class by moving private or charter schools up should raise a red flag. That's not in the Classification Review Committee's job description. If it were, then perhaps someone should have been looking to beef up the four-team Class B in football this past season.
All-state progress
In case you didn't see it, the New York State Sportswriters Association released its
boys cross country and
girls cross country teams this week.
We'll be wrapping up fall honors announcements with the football team selections the next two weeks, beginning with the small-school picks on Wednesday.
